What's new in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007

Note This topic is a summary of the new features in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. It also contains videos that show you more details about the new features. There are many features that were introduced in earlier versions of PowerPoint that carry on in PowerPoint 2007. For information about legacy features, see the PowerPoint 2007 Help-and-How-To page on Office Online.

To help you produce professional-looking presentations, PowerPoint 2007 provides a comprehensive set of features that you can use to create and format your information. You can create and add designer-quality SmartArt graphics with only a few clicks of your mouse.

Create and deliver dynamic presentations

A new and intuitive user interface

Office PowerPoint 2007 has a new, intuitive user interface called the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, which helps you create better presentations much more quickly than you could in earlier versions of PowerPoint. Office PowerPoint 2007 offers new and improved effects, themes, layouts, and enhanced formatting options that you can use to create great-looking, dynamic presentations in a fraction of the time that you used to spend. You can:

Find features and commands in intuitively categorized tabs and related groups.

Themes and Quick Styles

Office PowerPoint 2007 comes with new themes, layouts, and Quick Styles that offer you a wide range of options when you are formatting your presentations. In the past, formatting a presentation took more time because you had to choose the color and style options individually for your tables, charts, and graphics and make sure that they matched one another. Themes simplify the process of creating professional presentations. Just select the theme that you want, and PowerPoint 2007 does the rest. With one click, the background, text, graphics, charts, and tables all change to reflect the theme that you select, ensuring that all elements in your presentation complement one another. And best of all, you can apply the same theme to a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document or Microsoft Office Excel 2007 worksheet that you apply to your presentation.

After you apply a theme to your presentation, the Quick Style galleries change to adapt to that particular theme. As a result, any new SmartArt graphics, tables, charts, WordArt, or text that you insert into the presentation automatically match your existing theme. With consistent theme colors, all of your materials can look consistent and professional.

Custom slide layouts

With Office PowerPoint 2007, you are no longer confined to prepackaged layouts. You can now create your own custom layouts that can contain as many placeholders as you want; elements such as charts, tables, movies, pictures, SmartArt graphics, and clip art; and even multiple slide master sets with custom layouts for different slide topics. You can also now save the layouts that you customize and create for future use.

For more information about standard and custom slide layouts, see the article Overview of layouts.

Designer-quality SmartArt graphics

In the past, you may have had to hire a professional designer to create designer-quality diagrams and charts. The diagrams that you received from the designer, however, were saved as images that you could not edit. Now, with SmartArt graphics, you can create editable illustrations of your information in an Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation simply and without the aid of a professional designer. You can add stunning visual effects to your SmartArt graphics, shapes, WordArt, and charts, including three-dimensional (3-D) effects, shading, reflections, glows, and more.

New and improved effects

You can add effects like shadow, reflection, glow, soft edges, warp, bevel, and 3-D rotation to shapes, SmartArt graphics, tables, text, and WordArt in your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentations. You no longer have to hire a designer to create these effects for you. Instead, you can use professional, easy-to-modify effects yourself directly in PowerPoint.

New text options

You can create professional-looking presentations with a wide range of text formatting features, including text wrapping within a shape, text in columns or running vertically down a slide, and paragraph-level rulers. You can also now select discontinuous text.

New character styles provide you with more text choices. In addition to all of the standard styles of previous versions of PowerPoint, in Office PowerPoint 2007 you can choose all caps or small caps, strikethrough or double strikethrough, and double or color underline. You can add fills, lines, shadows, glow, kerning, and 3-D effects to your text.

By using themes, you can change how your presentation looks with a click of the mouse. You can modify theme fonts, theme colors, and theme effects by choosing a different option.

Table and chart enhancements

In Office PowerPoint 2007, tables and charts have been redesigned to be much easier to edit and work with. The Ribbon offers many easy-to-find options for editing your tables and charts. The Quick Styles galleries present all of the effects and formatting options that you need to create professional-looking tables and charts. You can cut and paste data, charts, and tables from Microsoft Office Excel 2007 more smoothly than before. With themes, your presentations can now have the same look as your worksheets.

Proofing Tools

The spelling checker has been made more consistent across the 2007 Microsoft Office system programs. Examples of this change include the following:

Several spelling checker options are now global. If you change one of these options in one Office program, that option is also changed for all the other Office programs. For more information, see the article Choose how spelling and grammar checking work.

The 2007 Microsoft Office system spelling checker includes the post-reform French dictionary. In Microsoft Office 2003, this was an add-in that had to be separately installed. For more information, see the article Choose how spelling and grammar checking work.

An exclusion dictionary is automatically created for a language the first time that language is used. Exclusion dictionaries let you force the spelling checker to flag words you want to avoid using. They are handy for avoiding words that are obscene or that don't match your style guide. For more information, see the article Use exclusion dictionaries to specify a preferred spelling for a word.

The spelling checker can find and flag some contextual spelling errors. Have you ever typed a mistake similar to the following? I will see you their. In Office PowerPoint 2007, you can enable the Use contextual spelling option to get help with finding and fixing this type of mistake. This option is available when you check the spelling of documents in English, German, or Spanish. For more information, see the article Choose how spelling and grammar checking work.

Presenter view

By using two monitors, you can run your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation from one monitor (at a podium, for example) while your audience views it on the second monitor. Presenter view offers the following tools to make it easier for you to present information:

You can use thumbnails to select slides out of sequence and create a customized presentation for your audience.

Preview text shows you what your next click will add to the screen, such as a new slide or the next bullet in a list.

Speaker's notes are shown in large, clear type so that you can use them as a script for your presentation.

You can black out the screen during your presentation and then resume where you left off. For example, you might not want to display the slide content during a break or a question and answer period.

Share information effectively

In previous releases of PowerPoint, large file sizes made it difficult to share content or send presentations through e-mail, and you could not reliably share presentations with people who were using different operating systems.

Now, whether you need to share presentations, create approval and review workflows, or collaborate with people online who do not use Office PowerPoint 2007, there are many new ways to share and collaborate with others.

Slide Libraries

In Office PowerPoint 2007, you can share and reuse slide content by storing individual slide files in a centrally located Slide Library on a server running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can publish slides from PowerPoint 2007 to a Slide Library, and you can add slides to your PowerPoint presentation from a Slide Library. By storing content in a Slide Library, you reduce the need to re-create content because you can easily repurpose existing content.

When you use Slide Libraries, you can ensure that your content is up-to-date by linking slides in your presentation to slides that are stored on the server. If the server version changes, you will be prompted to update your slides.

PowerPoint XML file formats

PowerPoint XML file formats are compressed, thus yielding substantially smaller file sizes and reducing the storage and bandwidth requirements. In Open XML Formats, segmented data storage helps you recover corrupted documents, because corruption of one part of a document does not prohibit the remainder of the document from being opened.

Save as PDF or XPS

Portable Document Format (PDF) PDF is a fixed-layout electronic file format that preserves document formatting and enables file sharing. The PDF format ensures that when the file is viewed online or printed, it retains exactly the format that you intended, and that data in the file cannot be easily changed. The PDF format is also useful for documents that will be reproduced by using commercial printing methods.

XML Paper Specification (XPS) XPS is an electronic file format that preserves document formatting and enables file sharing. The XPS format ensures that when the file is viewed online or printed, it retains exactly the format that you intended, and that data in the file cannot be easily changed.

Protect and manage information

When sharing your presentation with others, you want to be confident that it cannot be accessed by people who should not see it. You also want to make sure that your presentation does not include unintentional content, private information, or editing marks that call out words that the recipient's dictionary does not recognize. Furthermore, you might want to restrict access to the content within your presentation so that potentially sensitive information is not publicly distributed.

Office PowerPoint 2007 offers many ways to help you protect and manage your information.

Secure your presentations

With a number of new security features in Office PowerPoint 2007, you can help ensure that your presentation is safely managed after it leaves your hands by hiding the author's name, making sure that all comments have been deleted, and restricting who can make changes to it.

Prevent changes to a final version of a document

Before you share a final version of your presentation with other people, you can use the Mark As Final command to make the presentation read-only and communicate to other people that you are sharing a final version of the presentation. When a presentation is marked as final, editing commands, proofing marks, and typing are disabled, and people who view the document cannot inadvertently change the document. The Mark As Final command is not a security feature. Anyone can edit a document that is marked as final by turning off Mark As Final.

Find and remove hidden metadata and personal information in documents

Before you share your presentation with other people, you can use the Document Inspector to check the presentation for hidden metadata, personal information, and content that may be stored in the presentation. The Document Inspector can find and remove information like comments, ink annotations, document properties, document management server information, invisible objects, off-slide content, presentation notes, and custom XML data. The Document Inspector can help you ensure that the presentations you share with other people do not contain any hidden personal information or any hidden content that your organization might not want distributed. Additionally, your organization can customize the Document Inspector to add checks for additional types of hidden content.

Add a digital signature to your presentation

You can help provide assurance as to the authenticity, integrity, and origin of your presentation by adding an invisible digital signature to the presentation. Digital signatures provide a record of exactly what was signed, and they allow a signature to be verified in the future.

Information Rights Management

You may need to control who can access company information, especially if you are creating presentations that contain highly confidential information. By using the 2007 Office release with Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services for Windows Server 2003, you can assign permissions that prevent others from copying, printing, or editing your presentation.

Manage document properties in the Document Information Panel

The Document Information Panel makes it easy to view and edit document properties while you work on your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentations. The Document Information Panel is displayed at the top of your document in Office PowerPoint 2007. You can use the Document Information Panel to view and edit both standard Microsoft Office document properties and properties for files that are saved to a document management server. If you use the Document Information Panel to edit the document properties for a server document, the updated properties will be saved directly to the server.

Office Diagnostics

Microsoft Office Diagnostics is a series of diagnostic tests that can help you to discover why your computer is crashing. The diagnostic tests can solve some problems directly and may identify ways that you can solve other problems. Microsoft Office Diagnostics replaces the following Microsoft Office 2003 features: Detect and Repair and Microsoft Office Application Recovery.

Program Recovery

Office PowerPoint 2007 has improved capabilities to help you to avoid losing work when the program closes abnormally. Whenever possible, Office PowerPoint 2007 tries to recover some aspects of the state of the program after it restarts.

For example, say you are working on several files at the same time. Each file is open in a different window with specific data visible in each window. Office PowerPoint 2007 crashes. When you restart Office PowerPoint 2007, it opens the files and restores the windows to the way they were before Office PowerPoint 2007 crashed.